Africa

There is a reason why economics is known as the “dismal science.” For all of the accoutrements of precision and exactitude, the reality is that much of economics is at least as much alchemy as science, and the supposed “laws” of economics are more like guidelines than immutable realities.

It is thus not surprising that Thabo Mbeki and some of his critics have such wildly varying views of his economic policies. Mbeki defends his record by pointing out the consistent, steady rates of growth of the South African economy under his watch and argues that his policies have prevented some of the econolic calamities experienced elsewhere. His critics, the SACP and COSATU chief among them, believe that he is not doing enough to address poverty and accuse him of being delusional about the direction of the economy.

Both arguments have merit, but when it comes to economic policies, I tend not to buy into what the SACP wants to sell. Mbeki has not done enough to embrace anti-poverty programs, and the gap  between the haves and have nots, which continues to grow, is appalling. Nonetheless, the anti-liberalism pablum that the leftists on the Tri-Partite Alliance want to spew also leaves me cold. In an ideal world the government would continue on its course while expanding enough to embrace more ardent programs to address inequality, poverty, unemployment and the like.

Tired of rising electricity and food prices, 25,000 members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) marched on Eskom’s Johannesburg offices today. The march sounds as if it was almost festive, with a holiday mood prevailing among the marchers. But beneath the surface there is real anger. I heard it when I spoke with South Africans over the last month, and the anger manifests itself all over the pages of the country’s newspapers, the pictures on its television screens, and in the words and actions of its people.

As usual, the political ramifications linger just beneath the surface. protests these days are all aimed directly or indirectly at a government that appears not only not to be able to provide basic services and to fill basic needs, but that, worse, appears not to care. This seeming lack of apathy largely explains much of the mobilization behind Jacob Zuma, who has yet to reveal how his government would differ from Thabo Mbeki’s on issues of delivery and poverty alleviation. One of the benefits of opposition to an unpopular leader is that one can be vague about solutions. In this sense, Jacob Zuma is a cipher capitalizing on the country’s discontented mood, meaning all things to all people.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I tend to see most social phenomena through a political lens. Those of us who work on politics are akin to the guy with the hammer who looks at most problems and sees nothing but nails. That said, South Africans tend to be a politicized lot. Everything is political. Even those things that are not.

These are fascinating times to be an observer of South African life. There is a divide within the African National Congress that can only vaguely be attributed to policy differences or even to ideology, at least in the broadest sense. That divide has manifested itself in two personalities: That of President Thabo Mbeki and that of ANC president and presumptive successor to Mbeki, Jacob Zuma. Of late the rhetoric from Zuma’s most ardent supporters – most notably the leadership of the ANC Youth League – has been heated, indeed dangerous. When future generations of leaders begin talking about killing and dying for their leadership you either have inordinate loyalty or a dangerously volatile political climate. Most South Africans fear the latter.

Furthermore, the country’s legal culture reflects the Mbeki-Zuma divide, with high-level judges falling on one side or the other and thus making the judiciary a potential political flashpoint, if it is not at that stage already. With Jacob Zuma still very much caught up in corruption charges that could derail not only his political aspirations but also his freedom, and with the possibility that such an event would cause
South Africa to convulse.

And then there is the litany of issues that the country faces, and that no leader is going to have an easy time addressing: Inter alia, Crime (the new fad among South Africa’s bad guys is blowing up ATM machines and looting the contents), corruption (among the political class but also other elites – think the recent arms sales scandal), poverty and the entire economic apparatus tied up with it, and foreign affairs (Zimbabwe now, Darfur, the role of China on the continent, and then the usual putting out of fires that is the role of a regional superpower). 

The reality is that the Mbeki-Zuma divide has little to do with differences on how to approach any of these issues and everything to do with internal divisions in the party that for now is the only viable source of political power and patronage in the country. Theoretically Zuma’s support comes from the left, from the COSATU-SACP wings of the tripartite alliance, where Mbeki’s comes from the center (there really is no right-wing of the ANC, no matter what the left would have us believe), the party’s putative mainstream, though the fact that Zuma benefits from significantly more support than does Mbeki throws the idea of what exactly the ANC’s mainstream is right now.  

I have long argued that the only way there will ever be a serious challenge to the ANC will come if COSATU and SACP break away and form their own leftist party, at which point the ANC would probably garner a plurality of the country’s votes, but not a pure majority, which would bring with it the interesting spectacle of a party such as the Democratic Alliance becoming kingmakers in what would become a coalition government along the lines of those in many parliamentary systems. But with Zuma’s status as a longstanding ANC stalwart, that break has been tabled for the foreseeable future.

[Crossposted at the FPA’s Africa Blog.] 

In an extensive interview with the Mail & Guardian ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe last week effectively told COSATU to back off, to stop trying to run the party’s and the country’s internal affairs, and effectively debunked the idea that Jacob Zuma might be more receptive to giving COSATU and the SACP greater power within the tripartite alliance. Assuming that Mantashe spoke with Zuma’s blessing and articulated the ANC president’s will, this is huge news that might cause splintering of the tripartite alliance (which I have long predicted). But even if Mantashe spoke of his own volition and did not represent Zuma’s will, his words still are portentous for COSATU’s goals of greater power within the ANC coalition. The ANC-COSATU-SACP alliance has long been asymmetrical, and once the imbalance outweighs the putative access to power, COSATU and the SACP will forge their own alliance and go their own way. The divide will not happen in 2008 and may not happen as the result of the 2009 elections, but it will take place. And when it does, the effect on South African politics will be monumental.

If it’s a new day in South Africa it inevitably means that the tension level has been ratcheted up another notch. The biggest story may be the rumors that if Jacob Zuma wins the ANC presidency he will get to work trying to find a way to force Mbeki out of office. One cannot help but wonder where such a move would fall on the business-personal divide.

Speaking of merging the personal and the political, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has officially thrown her support behind Thabo Mbeki, accepting a nomination for ANC Deputy President rather than take the chairmanship on her ex-husband’s campaign.

Naturally, many wonder what the overall effect of the Polokwane meetings and concomitant division, which has seeped down to (or risen up from?) the provincial level, will have on the ANC.  I’ve long argued that the ANC-COSATU-SACP coalition may not last forever and that the most viable opposition to the ANC would come from an internal splintering and not an external challenge. Are we seeing the first stages of that break today?

As COSATU and the SACP seem on the verge of seeing their plans achieve fruition through the rise to ANC party presidency of Jacob Zuma, which many are beginning to see as inevitable, it might be worth asking a few questions, as Muzibuko Jara does in the Mail & Guardian:

This is an opportune time for the left to confront some hard questions — and they should start with interrogating the allegedly progressive, democratic and transformative policy credentials of a Jacob Zuma-led ANC.

Without a doubt the succession battle has created conditions for a more democratic ANC. But how deep is this process, how long will it last and just how progressive is it? Is political space being sought only for a new elite of alliance leaders, or for people at the grassroots?

Jara seems skeptical as to whether the Zuma elixir represents the panacea so many seem to yearn for in a post-Mbeki dispensation. I know that I am. It remains to be seen what a Zuma presidency might mean, but there are no simple solutions and Zuma is not a messiah. 

It looks as if COSATU has begun to forge its independent path in what is certain to be a rollicking succession battle within the ANC. I have long argued that the ANC will eventually find its greatest challenges from within, and that a viable opposition is most likely to emerge from a division within the tripartite alliance of COSATU, SACP and the ANC qua ANC. The reality is that there is no viable party from the left or right that is going to challenge the ANC’s dominance any time soon, and that a particularly fruitless place to look is from center-right parties led primarily or even substantially from white South Africans, however well intentioned. Demographics and history mean that such a challenge simply has no shot at gaining traction.

COSATU has made their first move a strong one by quite clearly indicating that Jacob Zuma, he of the multiple criminal charges, including rape and various fraud accusations– the results of which are far from certain or complete – is their man. Indeed, in the sort of zealous absurdity that seems most common from political classes worldwide, Cosatu’s general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi recently compared Zuma to Nelson Mandela. Hyperbolic analogies aside, however, there is no doubting that Zuma enjoys tremendous support among many among the masses of the working classes. Similar to Winnie Madikazela Mandela, Zuma seems almost immune to criticism among the COSATU/SACP elements of the ANC alliance who believe that the government attacks them because they speak truth to power that power has no interest in hearing. The ANC, meanwhile, is not thrilled with what the party’s leaders see as COSATU’s presumptuousness.

Almost assuredly Zuma’s very public roller coaster ride will continue, as will the ANC’s in what is shaping up to be the most acrimonious, and maybe the most significant, year in South African politics since the CODESA negotiations. Strap in. It is going to be an exciting but very bumpy ride.

In an otherwise perceptive article in The New York Times, Michael Wines seems somewhat nonplussed by the possibility that Thabo Mbeki appears to be entering a lame duck phase as the South African President.

With that status comes more vocal complaints from within the ANC coalition ranks than we may have seen before, especially from the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). And yet COSATU and the SACP should be decidedly unsurprising sources of criticism for anyone with even a modicum of understanding of South African politics.

Your faithful scribe is almost but not quite back home and thus to something resembling normalcy. Full-scale blogging should resume next week. In the meantime, here are some Africa-related links:

In Zimbabwe the Interception of Communications Bill only awaits Robert Mugabe’s signature. My guess is he’s thrilled to do so, helping seal Zimbabwe’s totalitarian status. Meanwhile MacDonald Dzirutwe avers in the Mail & Guardian that Mugabe’s newest get-tough economic policies are likely to represent only a short-term palliative with deleterious long-range effects.

It is now Congo-Brazzaville’s opportunity to hold elections that raise all sorts of questions about probity, organizational skills, effectiveness, and the like.

In the category of “this comes as news to whom, exactly?” we must place a refugees International report that asserts that Sudan’s rape laws are making the human rights catastrophe in Darfur worse. I do not aim my sarcasm at Refugees International, but rather at a crisis that is so far gone that such obvious accounts still qualify as being significantly newsworthy.

In Accra we might soon find out if we are closer to seeing the emergence of a United States of Africa. Just five years after its inception as a new and better organization of African states, the African Union (AU) debates tightening their confederation even more.  

 In South Africa:

Petrol prices continue to pose problems, with recent price drops in some areas accompanied by price hikes in others. 

As the ANC meets to debate future directions, the party’s succession battle accelerates, with a question that has been a subtext for some time now rising to the fore – does the party leader of necessity have to be the political standard bearer? Meanwhile, Thabo Mbeki has not so subtly hinted to the South African Communist Party (SACP) that it might be time for the comrades to steer their own separate course. I have argued for years that the only serious challenge to the ANC will come from the left, not the right, from black politicians, not disenchanted whites. Apparently Mbeki is willing to accelerate the process.

The mass action strikes are finally over. A South African cabinet minister and a prominent labour leader weigh in on their meaning.

Finally, the Springboks have had their luggage pilfered.  Is this another angle for the South African crime epidemic? Not exactly. The thefts appear to have occurred in Australia, where the South African ruggers are preparing for the next part of their Tri-Nations away leg.  

First South African workers become embroiled in a general strike the end of which is not in sight. Now it appears that Nigerian workers are set to embark on their own general strike. The Nigerian strikes will be the result of rising fuel costs, an increase in Value Added Taxes, and the sale of government-owned oil refineries to cronies of Olusegun Obasanjo in the former President’s final days in office. The government has made some compromises, but not enough to placate the Nigeria Labour Congress.